Motorists driving along Dillon’s Martin Luther King Boulevard recently might have been surprised, even curious to notice a floral arrangement placed in front of the J V Martin Auditorium. There is a story behind the white carnations going all the way back to November, 1963. If you were living then, you most likely would recall the events of that history making day.
Also another date enters into this story, December 16, 2014. It was the day of the funeral of a beloved teacher, born on an Easter Sunday nearly a century ago (1924) whose calming influence on that November day was remembered by one of her students thus the flowers.
That November 22, 1963 Friday, he and his classmates were attending her class at Dillon High School when the public address system uncharacteristically came to life to announce for a student assembly in the auditorium. The news: President John F. Kennedy had been shot riding in a motorcade trip in Dallas, Texas.
One who lived through this national drama can easily imagine the effect this news had on the group of teen agers who had never been exposed to such a national tragedy. After a moment of stunned silence, confusion followed with unanswered questions from the more stoic; sobs came from those who found the news profoundly disturbing. Emotions were rampart and into this atmosphere came a calming voice of the teacher who asked for a moment of silence, followed by her authoratative assurance that the situation, while devastating, would be resolved quickly by the authorities. In retrospect, these might have been shallow words of comfort but back then, when this teacher spoke, students listened. There was no possible way to relieve the anxiety and grief experienced by these youngsters, but short of the impossible, her words and actions seemed to settle things down especially when later news came that President Kennedy had died from an assassin’s bullet.
So what about the flowers? More than 50 years later, one of the recently departed teacher’s students on that fateful November day remembered how she handled this difficult classroom situation so as a memorial to her and her actions that day, he ordered this arrangement and instead of having it immediately delivered to the grave site, he reasoned that a more appropriate place was near the JVM classroom where she and others resolutely dealt with one of the nation’s saddest moments.
And the one who judged that occasional as memorable, he is in an enviable position to render such a verdict.
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Bill Lee, PO Box 128,
Hamer, SC 29547
